12:15pm | Battle Royale succeeds where The Hunger Games fails because of the latter’s high level of contrivance. While Battle Royale gives itself over gleefully to its style-over-substance essence (snatching at humanity and social commentary only where it springs up like a weed), The Hunger Games, with a panoramic focus on Panem and its 12 once-rebellious outlying districts that tightens to a laser-point on true-of-spirit archer-prodigy Katniss Everdeen (every cinematic move made with a meta-eye on becoming the next Harry Potter-type franchise), rarely feels organic. Its characters, its structure, its political and characterological contrivances — all have the distinct taste of product.
But artificial ingredients sometimes have a pleasant texture. Sometimes they’re even tasty. Only don’t try to live off them.
Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence, doing a stoical thing with moments that are supposed to break our hearts) is a fabulous young huntress of rural District 12 who loves her little sister Prim so much that when Primrose is chosen (by way of a Shirley Jackson-style lottery) as District 12’s female “tribute” (representative) in the annual Hunger Games,1 big sis volunteers to compete in Prim’s place.
If you’ve been paying even a little attention, you knew Prim would get selected and you knew Kantiss would go instead, just as 10 minutes later you’re quite sure Kantiss and her male counterpart, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), will get romantic. The Hunger Games is plagued with plot points you see coming from dozens of minutes away. Right off you spot Kantiss’s surrogate little sister. You know that every peripheral (at this point in the saga, anyway) character you meet is bound show you an angle incongruous to the first impression director Gary Ross means her/him to make. Once the action gets cartoony (e.g., a female tribute effortlessly throws knives into bull’s-eyes à la Buffy the Vampire Slayer2 sans wit), you feel yourself on a slope of realism that’s all downhill from here (culminating in a truly ludicrous action-finale with canes ex machina).
Credibility is further strained by the simultaneously oblivious and calculated cruelty of the Capitol, a state of moral turpitude not impossible in Ancient Rome (a parallel made embarrassingly literal by Collins actually employing character names like “Caesar” and “Seneca”3) but realizable only in a one-dimensional sketch of a post-literate society. Think about The Cove. Japanese fishermen may think it’s okay to club dolphins to death, but they damn sure didn’t want to be filmed doing it. You’re talking about a pretty primitive (by our lights) society to turn such practice into a mass-marketed spectator sport. And that’s with dolphins, not people. For the Hunger Games to be a staple tradition, wherein its tributes are treated as they are here (in “pregame” as much as during the main event), the vast majority of Capitol’s denizens either would have to regard the inhabitants of the Districts with even more antipathy than the Third Reich had for Jews, or be sincerely ignorant of District and Capitol inhabitants being even related species. Neither of these portraits is painted, and so the Capitol never comes off the canvas as anything more than a Big Bad Villain in melodrama.
But it’s through the character of the Capitol that we get our first frissons of real fun. Something Ross does extremely well several times during the first three-quarters of The Hunger Games is move us from one physical environment to another, usually from a character’s perspective, such as when Katniss and Peeta’s train pulls into the Capitol and we see that a Hunger Games muckety-muck’s sartorial style is representative of an entire milieu. It’s great, immersive fun. Ditto for Katniss’s walking onstage (great use of sound here) and being lifted into the arena. And the Capitol partying on the eve of the Big Game is so nice Ross should have held it twice (as long).
However much Ross does right by diving right in, there’s at least as much from which he shies away. Case in point: the gore — or lack of it. The violence of Battle Royale is stylized in such a way that you’re not really meant to take it seriously; even so, the gore injects the dead-still results of the carnage with pathos. But The Hunger Games fails on this score, because Ross inexplicably (unless it was about keeping that PG-13 rating) withholds much of the visual reckoning with what results from gladiatorial combat, leaving us feeling cold just when he wants us to care.
In creating The Hunger Games, Collins and Ross have synthesized shamelessly from not only Battle Royale, but The Running Man, The Truman Show, and Stephen King’s The Long Walk. And no one needs to read the rest of the series to know the 74th Annual Hunger Games (I wonder who’s going to win) will go down in history as When Things Started to Change. Brave souls began to engage in brave acts that raised collective consciousness, including conscience within the Capitol, yadda yadda.
But some journeys you take as a lark. The Hunger Games may espouse platitudes about hope and goodness (you’ll notice from shots of crowds from opening-weekend screenings that the appeal of the books/film complex does not fly over the heads of teenagers), but a good chunk of the time it takes this cloth and sews a garment that feels nice to the touch.
There’s not necessarily sin in pleasure that’s only skin-deep. If you’re not hungering for more when you walk into the Art Theatre, this film is fair game. If you are, you might come away unsatisfied.
Postscript: The Art Theatre has made the wise move of booking Battle Royale for a midnight screening on Friday, April 13. See this space for a (p)review of that fab flick during the week prior.
Art Theatre of Long Beach, 2025 E. 4th Street. (562) 438-5435
FOOTNOTES
1 Since there is only the one game each year (with one goal: survive), in the context of the film it should be like the Super Bowl: singular; “the Hunger Game.” It’s not like the Olympics, where you have Basketball, Beach Volleyball, the Men’s 110-meter High Hurdles, etc. (One of many internal inconsistencies in The Hunger Games.)
2 i.e., the TV series, not the film.
3 Plus there’s “Panem,” as in panem et circenses (Latin: “bread and circuses”), the Roman poet Juvenal’s (c. 100 CE) laconic assessment of the only real cares of the hoi polloi in his time.